Posts Tagged ‘Buenos Aires’

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told the United Nations Tuesday afternoon that Israel will never allow Iran to possess nuclear weapons and that it will act alone to prevent a nuclear Iran if sanctions do not work.

He did not mince words in attacking the Iranian regime for being deceitful and anti-democratic, and he provided fact after fact to prove that the regime has been hiding behind “smooth rhetoric” in order to “have its yellow cake and eat it, too.”

The Prime Minister verbally knocked out Iranian President Hassan Rohani, comparing him with his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with one external difference.

“Ahmadinejad was a wolf in wolf’s clothing; Rohani is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. A wolf who thinks he can pull the wool over the eyes of the international community, but like everyone else, I wish we could believe Rohani’s words, but we must focus on Iran’s action,” Netanyahu said.

Prime Minister Netanyahu told the United Nations that Rohani is a servant to a “rogue” regime that wants to annihilate Israel and that Rohani simply cannot be believed when he says he wants negotiations over its nuclear program.

He pleaded with the international community not to let up on sanctions in return for “cosmetic concessions” that would allow Iran to race ahead to develop nuclear weapons when it wants.

Iran was quick to respond to what one delegate said was an “extremely inflammatory statement.” The delegate told the General Assembly that the “Prime Minister must not dare think about attacking Iran.”

He countered Netanyahu’s warning that Israel will defend itself by stating, “He should seriously avoid miscalculation against Iran. Iran’s century-long policy of nonaggression should not be interpreted as an unwillingness to defend itself.”

The delegate then tried to turn the tables on Israel, mocking it for demanding that Iran disclose its nuclear program while Israel needs to be “educated” for being the “only non-party” to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Without refuting the Prime Minister’s carefully outlined evidence that Iran is trying to gain capability to manufacture a nuclear warhead, the delegate said with a straight face, “We reject equating the peaceful pursuit of nuclear energy with nuclear weapons.”

The only kind words Netanyahu had for Iran was for the ancient Persian empire.

“Our hope for the future is challenged by a nuclear-armed Iran…but I want you to know that this was not always the case,” he said. “Some 2,500 year ago, the great Persian King Cyrus ended the Babylonian exile of the Jewish people…[and] proclaimed the right of Jews to return to the Land of Israel and to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.”

He said this historic tie lasted for centuries but that in 1979, “a radical regime took over Iran” and “was busy thrashing the Iranian people’s hopes for democracy” while encouraging chants of “death to the Jews.”

The central theme of Netanyahu’s speech was that Rohani is a con artist who has been up to his neck in encouraging the secret development of nuclear weapons and is also an integral part of the Iranian regime’s policies of brutal suppression of domestic opposition and support of terrorist attacks against the West.

“He was on the Supreme Council from 1989 to 2003, during which time Iran gunned down opposition leaders and murdered 85 people in the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires,” Prime Minister Netanyahu asserted. He also fingered Iran for attack that cost the lives of 241 U.S. Marines in Beirut.

As for Rohani’s speech in the United Nations last week when he patted the Islamic Republic on the back for being “democratic,” Prime Minister Netanyahu retaliated, “The regime he represents executes dissidents by the hundreds, kills them by the thousands,” and participates in Assad’s “massacre of tens of thousands of men, women and children” while propping up the regime that uses chemical weapons against its own citizens.

“I wish I could believe Rohani but I don’t because facts are …that Iran’s savage record contradicts soothing rhetoric,” the Prime Minister added.

He reminded the United Nations that Rohani, as the negotiator for Iran from 2003 to 2005, “masterminded the strategy that allowed Iran to seek nuclear weapons behind very soothing rhetoric.”

USA Today on Tuesday published evidence to back up Netanyahu’s accusations that Rohani and his Muslim superiors are trying to pull the wool over the world’s eyes.

Last Friday, President Barack Obama gushed over Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei who the president said “has issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons.”

However, the newspaper cited research from MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute) that no such fatwa exists.

“An exhaustive search of the various official websites of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei turned up no such fatwa, either on his fatwa website or on his personal website,” according to MEMRI.

The research group “says the fatwa was first mentioned by Sirius Naseri, an Iranian representative to a meeting of the U.N.’s nuclear agency in 2005, but is not listed among the hundreds of fatwas that Khamenei has issued on his official or personal website,” USA Today wrote.

Netanyahu clearly spelled out Iran’s history of being caught “red-handed” at least twice building underground nuclear facilities and pointed out that it is developing Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), which he said are for the “sole purpose of carrying nuclear warheads.”

He reiterated his demands in last year’s speech at the United Nations that Iran must dismantle its nuclear infrastructure, turn over is stockpile of enriched uranium and stop all enrichment before sanctions can be lifted.

He said sanctions are working and that Rohani was elected to remove the sanctions while continuing to develop nuclear weapons and declared, “Rohani thinks he can get away with it because he has gotten away with it before.”

The third season of the television hit “Homeland” will discuss the bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires.

In the first episode, which is scheduled to air on Sept. 29, CIA agents agree during a meeting on a list of six terrorists who must be captured. A CIA agent presents one of the terrorists, along with a map of Argentina and photos of the AMIA Buenos Aires Jewish center after it exploded on July 19, 1994.

“His name is Maijd Javadi. He is a commander with the Islamic revolutionary guard current deputy minister of his intelligence directory. He hasn’t been seen in public since 1994, when the Mossad identified him as one of the men behind the bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires which killed 85 people,” he says about the terrorist.

In reality, Maijd Javadi is not one of the suspects in the bombing, but is an Iranian musician.

News about the attack appearing on “Homeland,” which is modeled after a popular Israeli television series, is spreading through Argentinian social media just one week ahead of the United Nations General Assembly, as local political analysts are speculating about whether the country’s president, Cristina Fernandez, will mention the AMIA bombing and the agreement that the country signed with Iran in order to jointly investigate the 1994 attack. The Iranian parliament has not yet ratified the agreement.

An Argentinian prosecutor a government official of incitement against Israel and public intimidation.

Alberto Nisman, the special prosecutor investigating the 1994 bombing of the AMIA cultural center, said there is “concrete evidence to start an investigation” of acting Under Secretary of Family Agriculture Emilio Persico, who participated in an Aug. 2 ceremony marking Al Quds Day at the At-Tawhid Mosque in Buenos Aires.

On Aug. 14, the Simon Wiesenthal Center wrote to Argentina’s minister of agriculture, Norberto Yauhar, calling for Persico’s removal. “Apparently, the speakers at Al Quds Day in Buenos Aires feel energized and empowered by the Argentina-Iran agreement, and now foment hate with impunity,” Sergio Widder, the Wiesenthal Center’s director for Latin America, told JTA, referring to a much-criticized agreement between the countries to jointly investigate the AMIA bombing.

The next day, Persico went to the headquarters of DAIA, the Jewish political umbrella group, to explain his position. DAIA president Julio Schlosser then told media: “We understood his reasons and the situation is finished.”

Hillel Argentina and Tel Aviv University are launching an entrepreneurship center and incubator of companies for Jewish entrepreneurs.

The companies participating in the program, which will start Tuesday, will have training and accelerator courses in Buenos Aires and Tel Aviv with a focus on entrepreneurship, Jewish business values and Israel-Diaspora ties.

Ryan Fain, the Hillel director in charge of the Hilabs program, told JTA that the program “is unique throughout the world and has the goal of connecting the Jewish youth of the Diaspora with Israel in a non-traditional way.”

The program aims to train young people with entrepreneurial spirit to promote the creation of companies of young people in the community and spread the ethical and moral values of Judaism. The Argentinian mentors are well-known, successful Jewish entrepreneurs.

The program includes a formation stage, training and incubator, two months in Buenos Aires and two months in Israel, mainly at StarTau, the Tel Aviv University Entrepreneurship Center. The program between Israel and the Diaspora also has support from the Jewish Agency.

“The part in Israel is very unique, as it is the only option for young Diaspora Jews to learn hands-on the Israeli entrepreneurial process and to meet with young successful entrepreneurs,” StarTau director Amos Avner told JTA.

Iranian President-elect Hassan Rohani, described as a “moderate” by media after he narrowly won this week’s election to success Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was on the committee that planned the mega-terrorist bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires in 1994. He also has backed hiding Iran’s nuclear program.

Western diplomats’ knee-jerk reaction to any change on leadership in the Middle East, except in Israel, was full of praise for Rohani.

The United States “respected” the election results and is ready for “direct” engagement and intends “to aggressively push to resume negotiations with Tehran on its nuclear program by August to test his new government’s positions.”

European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said she was “fully committed” to working with Rohani’s government.

The Financial Times reported that Rohani “was the only moderate candidate in a race with five fundamentalists.”

How is he moderate? First of all, he is well-mannered. When someone tries to kill you, doesn’t it feel so much better when he smiles?

Secondly, Rohani is “pragmatic.”

He is very pragmatic. He was on the special Iranian committee that plotted the 1994 bombing in Argentina, killing 85 people and wounding hundreds of others.

Former Iranian intelligence official Abolghasem Mesbahi, who defected from Iran in the late 1990s, has previously testified that Rohani was then serving as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council in 1993 and was a member of the committee that approved the bombing, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

“Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei led the special committee, according to the indictment, and Khamenei and Rafsanjani made the ultimate decision to go ahead with the attack,” the Free Beacon explained.”

Reuel Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracy, told the Beacon, “Rohani’s power at that time comes directly from one individual, and that’s Rafsanjani. As far as that bombing was concerned, because Rafsanjani had to give his approval for that, there was no doubt Rohani was aware of it, and obviously his approval’s not necessary. He’s a subordinate. But he certainly would have been aware of all the discussions that led to the attack.”

How else is Rohanai a moderate? He supported the deadly suppression of crackdown on students protests in 1999.

Okay, so he hates Jews and is against protests? But maybe he is prepared to save the Iranian economy and ditch the nuclear program?

If his story is a clue, the answer is,“No chance.”

Rohani has supported concealing the Iranian nuclear program, saying that the West will accept it in the end just like it did hen Pakistan achieved nuclear capability. “The world started to work with them,” Rohani has stated.

Rohani was Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator from 2003 to 2005. He said in a speech in Iran in 2004, “As for building the atomic bomb, we never wanted to move in that direction …”

But: “If one day we are able to complete the (nuclear) fuel cycle and the world sees that it has no choice, that we do possess the technology, then the situation will be different.”

In other words, “If we don’t have an atomic bomb, I don’t want it. Once we have it, that’ a different story.”

When Iran was caught try to hide its nuclear development towards the end of the 20th century, Rohani stated. “This (concealment) was the intention. This never was supposed to be in the open. But in any case, the spies exposed it. We did not want to declare all this.”

Rohanai is practical like a fox. He can be compared to Mahmoud Abbas, who wears a suit and a tie instead of Yasser Arafat’s kefiah and pistol. The difference between Abbas’ Fatah party platform and Hamas is style. Both have the same objective of destroying Israel.

Rohani is much more polite than Ahmadinejad, but his tacit approval of the murder of Jews in Buenos Aires show that his intentions are no better, if not worse.

Like Abbas, he will use is mild manner to try to convince the West how much he really wants to cooperate with the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency.

Rohani, in 2004, spoke in favor of cooperating with the West, according to Reuters. He actually supported a freeze on enriching uranium, but only temporarily.

Carolina Raqucel Duer, a 33 year-old Jewish woman from Buenos Aires, Argentina, defended her World Boxing Organization Super Flyweight title on November 12 by defeating opponent Maria Jose Nunez of Uruguay. Nunez foreited the match in the third round, after being knocked down by Duer’s left cross.

Duer, known as “The Turk”, is the daughter of Syrian-Jewish immigrants to Argentina. As a child, she attended Jewish day school and Jewish after-school programs and camp, attended synagogue services and spent time in Israel working on a kibbutz.

I feel privileged to share with you the story of the creation of our new film, “Triumph of the Spirit.” For the longest time I have felt that there is a terrible void in Holocaust films and memorials. The epic story of the mesiras nefesh, the boundless sacrifice, that our people made in clinging to Torah and mitzvos – the devotion with which they served Hashem during one of the darkest moments in the annals of mankind has yet to be told.

I am most grateful to Hashem for granting me the merit of making a contribution, however small, in that direction and relating the story of my holy Zeide and Bubba, HaRav HaGaon HaTzaddik Yisroel HaLevi Jungreis and his Rebbetzin, H”YD, who were killed al Kiddush Hashem in Auschwitz, as well as the story of my holy parents, who, even in that horrific time, in the midst of savage brutality, tenaciously clung to Hashem, and lovingly kept the light of Torah burning in our hearts.

But allow me to begin at the beginning and share with you how all this came about. As many of you may be aware, our Hineni organization has a chapter in Yerushalayim. Our Israel branch is somewhat different in its thrust from our American program. In Yerushalayim, in addition to offering seminars, classes, shidduch opportunities and general outreach, we also address the sad reality of life in Israel.

We run a soup kitchen for the indigent and an outreach program for victims of terror. We take those who have been wounded in body and soul and try to imbue them with renewed strength and hope. We offer them visits to various European countries where the local Jewish communities host and honor them.

At the same time, we provide job training and counseling, and in time of crisis, such as during the period of the war in the North, when Kassam rockets rained down day and night on our brethren in the Galil, we brought countless families to Jerusalem. We provided them with food, shelter, Torah study and schooling for their children, and more recently, we have been hosting our brethren from Sderot.

This year the director of our Hineni Israel Chapter, Benjamin Philip, introduced yet another project. He acquired the exclusive rights to the Anne Frank exhibit, which was hitherto housed in Amsterdam, Holland. We were deeply honored at this opportunity to memorialize the life of this beautiful, sensitive young soul who suffered so much and whose poignant diary captured the imagination of the world.

At the same time however, I was once again reminded of the painful void that exists in the memorials for out holy martyrs. Their burning faith that was more powerful than the fires that raged in the crematoria, had yet to be related. “They were swifter than eagles and stronger than lions to fulfill the will of their Creator.” Through their abiding, immutable faith, they transcended the barbaric inhumanity of their tormentors, sanctified the Name of G-d, and gave life to a new generation of Torah committed Jews.

The Nazis were able to rob them of their homes, strip them of their rights, torture them with starvation and constant beatings . they could shove them into gas chambers, incinerate their bodies, but they could not snuff out their Yiddishe neshamos.

Over the years, I have often written and spoken about this, and time and again shared these thoughts with my children and grandchildren. And now, as if on cue, my granddaughter, Shaindy Wolff Eisenberg, who, Baruch Hashem, lives a beautiful Torah life with her family in Jerusalem, and who conducts many of our Hineni programs, called me with an idea.

Bubba,” she said, “if we are to have an Anne Frank exhibit, why don’t you create a parallel exhibit to relate all the stories about Zeide and Mamma, and all the Kedoshim, holy people, who gave their lives al Kiddush Hashem? You really must do it, Bubba,” she went on to say. “Whenever I heard you speak, I thought about it, but now, the time has come. There’s a whole new generation out there that doesn’t know, that has to be taught to understand and remember.”

And so it was that “The Triumph of the Spirit” was born. We premiered the film last week at our annual Hineni Dinner and the reaction was beyond anything we could have anticipated. Young and old, secular and religious, were all equally affected. There was an overwhelming demand to have the film seen by everyone. I am pleased to share with you that we plan to do just that.

B’Ezrat Hashem, on Tuesday evening, September 22, during Aseres Y’mei Teshuvah, we will have a showing of the film for the general public (at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on 85th and Lexington). To assure your place, you can reserve now by calling our Hineni office (212-496-1660) or e-mailing us at hineni@hineni.org.

As I write these lines, I am in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I was invited to address the beautiful Jewish community. We decided to bring a copy of the film with us. My first speech was to college-age young people, most of whom were secular. A large hall had been reserved for the occasion, and in no time at all, it was filled to capacity, but the young people kept coming until there was no place to even stand.

In Buenos Aires the language spoken is Spanish – our film is in English. I wondered how they would react. Would they be able to follow it? Would they lose interest? But from the opening moment, a silence descended on the audience. I looked out at the beautiful young faces – their eyes were glistening with tears. The “pintele Yid” that lies dormant in every neshamah was reignited.

At the end of the film, the young people approached me declaring their determination to walk on the path of Torah and give new life to the legacy of the holy martyrs. Can such a transformation occur instantaneously? Can people change so radically in an instant?

Of course they can, because they are not changing – they are not transforming. They are just returning to their true selves – the invincible pintele Yid that is always there, forever waiting to be rekindled.